Forever Summer (6 page)

500g yellow courgettes (2 large)

zest and juice of 1 lemon

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 litre chicken stock

100g basmati rice

Maldon salt and pepper

Cut the courgettes – wash them by all means if you want, but don’t bother to peel them – into 5mm rings, and then finely dice them. Put them into a pan with the lemon zest and oil, stir to coat, then cook on a gentle heat for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they’ve slightly softened.

Stir in the turmeric and pour in the stock and lemon juice and then drop in the rice. And for the stock here, as usual I make up some bouillon concentrate with water; you could use vegetable stock if you prefer, but I love the mellow goldenness you get from chicken. Cook, uncovered, for 10–20 minutes, or just until the courgettes and rice are tender. Taste for seasoning. Leave to cool slightly before serving so that you eat the soup warm rather than hot.

Serves 4–6.

And I sometimes exploit all this marvellous yellowness by making, if this doesn’t sound too poncey, a carpaccio of zucchini gialli, yellow courgettes. Just use a vegetable peeler to shave off thin curling strips. You will probably have to lose the central seedy core, so I’d reckon on using about one courgette per person. Just lay the strips of courgette (and see them thus adorning
quail
) on a plate, spritz with lemon and a tiny drizzle of oil, a sprinkle of Maldon salt and feather, if you wish, with a few frondy straggles of fresh dill.

PAPPARDELLE WITH COURGETTES, SULTANAS AND PINE NUTS

If there seems to be a rather small amount of pasta specified for four people here, it’s not because I’m exercising portion control, but because egg pappardelle swell voluptuously when cooked and a modest tangle of these dried yellow, wide-cut ribbons will plump up to take, appetite-satisfyingly, the whole panful of slow-cooked, sweet and mushy courgette sauce.

Please don’t hesitate about the addition of sultanas: this Moorish touch – the sauce emanates, in essence if not exactly, from Sicily and more generally from the Italian south – is not a fanciful one.

I can’t claim that this is a beautiful-looking sauce – the khaki tinge of the slow-cooked courgettes doesn’t speak of sprightly summer freshness – but its musky, herbal depth is fabulous enough. Eat on balmy evenings outside, with a bottle of resiny yellow wine, or to give the feeling of the same during a long, cold brutal northern winter. This is comfort food, southern-style.

15g butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

750g (4 medium) courgettes

1 clove garlic, minced

salt and pepper

2–3 tablespoons Marsala

50g sultanas

25g pine nuts

250g egg pappardelle

3 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan

small bunch fresh parsley, chopped

Heat the butter and oil in a heavy-based saucepan, and cut the courgettes into very fine rounds before adding them to the pan. Mince in the garlic and season with salt and pepper. Cook over a low to medium heat for about 45 minutes, stirring every now and again. When they are ready the courgettes will have sweated down – if you’ll forgive the expression – but still retain some colour and shape. In other words, you’re looking for a certain mushiness without going so far as out-and-out pulp. Not that it matters: if you forget these are on the stove and let them cook until they reach the state of pure, undifferentiated sauce, you will still have something pretty heavenly on your hands. Besides, in Sicily, you will find that different cooks have different preferences: as ever, there is no one way to cook the same thing.

While all this is going on, warm the Marsala, pour it over the sultanas and leave them to plump up for about 15 minutes, or longer if you want. Once the courgettes are cooked, stir the sultanas and their amber juices into them. Taste for seasoning. Toast the pine nuts by cooking them in a dry frying pan until they turn a golden brown, and remove to a cold plate.

Cook the pasta according to packet instructions, then drain and tip into a warmed bowl. Add the courgette mixture and fold and toss to combine. Sprinkle over the pine nuts, parmesan and most of the chopped parsley and toss everything gently together again. Sprinkle with the remaining parsley and take to the table.

Serves 6 as a starter; 4 as a main course.

TAGLIOLINI AL PESTO AMARO

This ‘bitter pesto’ is not alarmingly so, but the rocket certainly gives a more rasping bite than the softer herbal scentedness of the traditional basil leaves. The anchovy fillets provide a counterbalancing salty intensity, though if you’re making this for vegetarians, simply leave them out and add a couple of tablespoons of grated pecorino instead (or indeed just bolster the parmesan quantities). Finally, and importantly, the ricotta’s milky calmness perfectly offsets the ferocious tangle of ingredients that precedes it, providing just the right amount of mellow creaminess.

I tend to use tagliolini that’s been tinted green with spinach here but I have to say this is for reasons more visual than culinary. You neither have to go for the green, nor indeed use tagliolini to start with. Any pasta you like will do. One thing, though: you must make the pesto at the last minute (not hard) and use immediately; the sauce loses its intensity, and thus its point, on standing.

500g tagliolini verdi

50g rocket leaves

1 fat or 2 small cloves garlic, peeled

30g pine nuts

3 anchovy fillets

25g parmesan or pecorino, freshly grated

100ml extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon ricotta cheese

Heat a large pan of salted water and cook the pasta. Put all the other ingredients except for the olive oil and the ricotta into the bowl of the food processor fitted with the double-bladed knife and blitz to a purée. With the motor running, slowly pour the oil down the funnel, till you have a feltily green emulsion. Remove the lid, stir with a spatula to combine the oily puddle which will have collected around the blades and then dollop in the ricotta. Put the lid back on and blitz for a final few seconds, then tip into a bowl and stir to mix well.

You should be doing all this while the pasta’s cooking. Once it’s ready, drain and dress with this intense, baize-green emulsion.

Serves 6 as a starter; 4 as a main course.

RIGATONI AL POMODORO E PREZZEMOLO

I am a completely shameless solicitor for recipes: I don’t restrict myself to bothering just my friends and colleagues, but open the field to include any of their friends and colleagues too (indeed, anyone). This recipe finds its way here by just such a route. It was sent via a friend of my producer, David Edgar, one Geoff Metzker (to whom I am very grateful, as you should be, too) who picked it up during his time working for Sky in Rome. This is how this game works: cooking isn’t about the suspicious guarding of closely kept secrets but is a matter of sharing, passing on, the almost gossipy dissemination of habits and practices; recipes that are considered high level security documents are not recipes that survive (or ones, frankly, that you’d want to eat).

The bare ingredients don’t look much maybe, but everything comes together, without fuss, in the pan, on the plate: the perfect sauce when every tomato in the shop is tight-shouldered and unluscious.

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, cut into slivers

400g tin chopped tomatoes

125ml stock (Marigold vegetable bouillon powder and water is just fine)

bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped

salt and pepper

500g rigatoni

Put a large pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

Heat the oil and gently fry the garlic over low to medium heat. When it begins to take on a golden colour – though don’t let it scorch – add the tomatoes and turn up the heat. Stir in the stock and let it bubble away, reducing the sauce until it becomes quite lumpy and oily; this should take no more than about 10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and (just before serving) add the parsley. Taste for seasoning, too, of course.

Meanwhile, cook the rigatoni following the instructions on the packet, and then toss the pasta into the sauce in the pan. Combine everything well and serve straightaway.

Serves 6 for a starter; 4 for a main course.

SPAGHETTINI AL SUGO CRUDO

In Italy, pasta
al sugo
, pasta with a sauce, means
the
sauce, tomato sauce and this, when the tomatoes are raw, and the sauce is more of a fragrant, olive-oil-soused salad tumbled over hot pasta, is my favourite variant. It’s the first thing I make when I hit Italy, not just because this is best eaten under an Italian sun, but because this is best made with Italian tomatoes – by which I mean tomatoes that taste of tomatoes. Actually, it is easier to come by those here than it used to be, but the utmost vigilance is still required: I like tomatoes that are a bit smaller than the palm of my hand, preferably with stalk and indeed stem still attached, and I never, under any circumstances, keep them in the fridge.

1kg fabulous tomatoes

1 teaspoon caster sugar

Maldon salt

black pepper

1 clove garlic

125ml extra virgin olive oil

500g spaghettini

Blanch the tomatoes by putting them in a large bowl, pouring over boiling water from a kettle to cover, and letting them sit for a few minutes. Drain them, peel them (the blanching makes this easy: just cut with the tip of a knife and the skins will come away easily) then halve them and scoop out the pips. Cut away the cores (this is probably easier once you’ve quartered them) then chop them; I use my mezzaluna for this, though an ordinary sharp knife would do just fine. Scoop them up, put them in a bowl, stir in the sugar and sprinkle with Maldon salt and grind in some pepper. Lean on the garlic clove with the flat side of a knife to bruise it and peel off the skin and add the smashed clove to the tomatoes in the bowl along with the oil. Stir together brutally with a fork – though I tend to use my Magiwhisk (like a small whisk made of a beard-shaped coil of wire) for this; I want to beat this into more of a sauce – and cover with clingfilm and leave, out of the fridge, for at least half an hour and up to 8 hours.

Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions and once drained, pick out the garlic clove from the tomatoes in the bowl and throw it away, tossing the soused tomatoes into the hot spaghettini. I don’t like grated parmesan with this, but I often make it (as per the picture below) with a ball of buffalo mozzarella, diced and stirred into the tomato sauce a minute before combining sauce and pasta. When I’m in Tuscany, I like to use instead a handful of diced pecorino toscano, which is softer, crumblier and sweeter and with a creamier tang than the hard, sharp pecorino Romano used for usual grating (and in
capellini con cacio e pepe
). This is also wonderful, and helps with less fulsomely tomatoey tomatoes, when you add the juice of half a lemon to the tomatoes in the bowl and grate over the zest of a lemon as you toss the pasta in the sauce at the end. Needless to say – I’d presume – any of these variants taste wonderful with a
handful of basil leaves, shredded or torn up at the last minute (otherwise they’ll start to blacken), some tossed through the sauce before it goes on to the pasta, and some scattered over the pasta afterwards.

Serves 6 as a starter; 4 as a light main course.